Old Piles of Words Because the word is mightier than the stone.

Paradise Lost…

As we are slowly getting to the closing chapters of our southern adventure, we though it wouldn´t be quite fair to our readers to finish the story off on the beach in the sun, with us living happily ever after. So here is the true, unabridged and inglorious story of Matt and Venla's last couple of days in Latin America, as they travel from their paradise island to the harsh realities of Masaya and Managua.

The boat that was supposed to take us from Ometepe to shore was cancelled because of the island's fiesta (everybody went to the party), so we sat down by the side of the road to wait for possible transportation to the other harbour. A yellow chicken bus, fairly surprisingly, turned up less than an hour later as announced by the chips selling lady, and we even had time to get a last lunch of rice and beans before catching the 3 o'clock ferry to the mainland.

In the port, we haggled for a collective taxi ride to the nearby transportation hub of Rivas (with 4 of us on the back seat once more), and spent the whole ride arguing with the driver who kept trying to convince us that we had missed the last bus and we were never going to make it to our destination, whereas he could take us for only $15 a person. 15 minutes of telling him we were not interested got the price down to $6 per person, but we still decided to try our luck on the buses, a fairly daring move since it is true that buses do not usually run after nightfall, which was threatening to happen any minute.

We were lucky enough to hop onto a bus, which, we found out after a while, happened to stop exactly where we wanted to go. So we laid back and enjoyed being crushed between hundreds of elbows and knees and bellies and food baskets one more time. For a complete experience, the bus even did us the favor of breaking down by the side of the road for about half an hour, the driver and helper pouring gallons of water on the smoking motor. We finally got dropped just outside of Masaya, and hopped
into one last taxi to the center.

The town of Masaya, just one hour away from the capital, is an obligatory stop for every tourist to Nicaragua: its famed market supposed to be an extraordinary treasure trove, replete with a stunning variety of original crafts from all over Nicaragua. So we showed up at the market the next day, our pockets filled to the brim with shiny Cordoba and dollar bills, ready to pillage the magic market for Christmas presents and souvenirs. Unfortunately, we are, by all accounts, spoiled travelers, and, compared with the markets of, say, Bolivia or Mexico, this one seemed like a small tourist trap full of poorly made junk. We left the market about as rich as we had entered it, and beelined for Managua, our bags lighter than we had expected.

Managua, it turned out, was just as anticlimactic. The Nicaraguan capital will remain branded in our memories as the only place in Latin America that actually scared us off the streets. We spent the day before our flight surfing the inter-webs and only ventured as far as the nearby shopping mall and the eatery on the corner, where we downed one last portion of greasy rice and beans while watching cockroaches run on the walls around us.

Then we flew north, to what Matt likes to call "the real America". We celebrated our arrival during our six-hour layover in LAX by eating not one, but TWO meals at the Tex-Mex fast-food joint Baja Fresh! Ah, Latin food you can love!

So, yes, this is our last Latin American post- to say that we are not too sad to be slowly going home...